Monday, August 28, 2017

Here's an old illustration that I did for a fraternity event when I was in college. It was called Suau and generally, had its origins as a spoof of another fraternity's formal "Old South" party. They wore Confederate officers uniforms, some rode horses, and flew the rebel flag. Ours was more of a redneck luau and it was much more than a party. It started weeks before the event when most of the members stopped shaving. After about a week, we would don overalls, straw hats, and flannel shirts and deliver invitations in person. Some of us carried piglets or chickens for effect.

The party itself started Friday night. We stayed up all night with out chef as he cooked the pig. Poker and beer were essentials as was a good dose of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, and the Allman Brothers. Saturday morning the party started back up with games (usually involving mass quantities of beer), lunch, more music, and usually, mud was involved somehow. After lunch, we usually dropped our dates back at their rooms and everyone got showers and naps before it all started up again at night for a little more refined dance party with most of the brothers now clean-shaven and dressed much better. The party would usually start breaking up around 1am but would continue in some form as long as the beer was still flowing. Somewhere along the way, the party lost favor and then, my fraternity was banned from campus.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Last week, and despite all that is going on these days politically, I encountered two situations that gave me pause. The first struck me as odd when I stopped at a street vendor for lunch. She was selling hot dogs from a small hot dog cart and was being paid a visit by the Health Inspector. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The cart, I assume, passed as he finished his inspection while I was waiting and didn't appear to issue any citations. At the very least, he didn't shut her down so I assumed the food was safe. That said, as I stood and waited, I also watched. The cart operator was wearing sanitary gloves as food preparation was taking place. I am not aware of the actual law but she wore them while preparing the food and removed them before handling money—as she always does. The odd thing was that while the food inspector was rummaging around in her coolers, he did not wear gloves. Time and again, he handled raw meat and vegetables, and not once did he wear gloves. Another odd practice was that, while checking temperatures, he repeatedly used his thermometer without sanitizing it prior to sticking it into another item. I find that odd. If something was contaminated, his negligence would contaminate almost everything else in the cooler. To be fair, he did wipe it off each time BUT HE USED AN OLD STORE RECEIPT!

Saturday, I had another experience with a situation that makes me go "hmmm". I had stopped at a Raceway in Orange Park to get gas. Not my first choice as I like to know what kind of gas is going in my car but the place looked clean and well cared for. After filling 'er up, I pulled up to the store to wait for my wife. That was when I noticed the Brinks truck. As you would expect, there was an armed guard outside waiting for the second guard to exit the store—security measures. The problem with the picture that I was seeing was that the guard positioned outside the store had one hand occupied by her cigarette and the other was very much engaged by her phone. Had I been someone with ulterior motives, her behavior would have made for an easy target.

The things that you will see when you take a few moments to really take in what's going on around you is something. I'm not sure that something is something that makes me feel better about how distracted or intimidated people are these days.